Leadership, Technical, and Human

Technology isn’t just about the technical. Not by a long shot. It starts and ends with people.

Of course technical expertise is required, no doubt. But why do so many technology projects end in disappointment or debacle even when the technical side of the equation is well covered?

The answer is that the technical is only one side of the equation, and — especially internally to an organization — not even the most critical side.

The types of work required to maintain a healthy, effective technology ecosystem — whether small, simple, and constrained or large, complex, and ambitious — cover a much broader range of responsibilities than often expected, from “leadership” to “technical” to “human”. Each is critical to your success, and none can be overlooked.

Technical is the most easily understood, so let’s explore the other two points on the triangle.

HUMAN

When it comes to the “human” side of your technology, everyone knows that training is an essential piece of the puzzle. But the typical mechanisms for training around technology fall far short of a realistic plan for successful technology adoption. There’s a reason people don’t tend to feel particularly reassured after the typical training or two.

What does it take for someone to get really comfortable with using a system, and to know how to use it in the right way? It takes training and more training, exposure and use, running into questions, and an incredibly accessible, consistent level of support. And we’re not talking about the “please submit a ticket” kind of support. We’re talking about the friendly and accessible kind of support that views questions and inquiries and ideas as valuable invitations to help, assist, and learn. The kind of “human” ally-ship that recognizes that we’re all on the same team, and the better you use and understand the technology, the better our collective work will be.

Just as critically, this kind of all-out, ally-minded support creates a symbiotic situation where the insights and understanding gathered from that level of human support allows the product team to gather and prioritize fixes and opportunities for improvement at an entirely different level.

If you’re simply triaging bug requests, you’ll never be able to understand the living pulse of your technology and its intersection with the real work being done. But if you’re out there, supporting the living hell out of people, you’ll soon gather an invaluable level of context and understanding about the strengths and shortcomings of your technology as it’s actually being used, and that knowledge can be fed back into making it ever more valuable, helpful, and impactful.

LEADERSHIP

Probably the most critical — and often the most overlooked — side of the equation when it comes to successful technology is the realm of “leadership”. This includes the critical responsibilities associated with steering the ship through ever-changing waters and nearly unlimited potential destinations.

One key area of that leadership is the work of product management itself. The core responsibility of the product manager is charting a clear roadmap for the product’s development and maintenance, balancing needs, ambitions, priorities, and constraints into a coherent path forward.

There are many nuances to be said about the particulars of maintaining a product roadmap, but big picture it’s easy to understand why organizations who lack a clear roadmap tend to feel their product floats along adrift, full of frustration points and falling far short of its potential to support and enhance their work.

Equally as critical in the realm of leadership are key responsibilities that require excellent communication skills and a deft human touch, such as driving diplomacy, buy-in, and understanding among stakeholders and users around the organization and beyond.

Then, throw in all of the other common leadership functions such as budgeting, careful and detailed management of a team, and engaging and maintaining the consultant relationships, and you have a whopper of a critical area of responsibility -- often underestimated or neglected but absolutely essential to the success of the overall system.

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Stepping back and looking at these three critical areas -- leadership, technical, and human -- it’s evident how neglecting any one of them will result in critical pieces getting dropped. All three must be covered at a high level. So it’s no surprise that technology efforts that try to throw only technical expertise at the problem often come up so far short.

Looking at these three areas you can also readily understand how it’s asking a lot to try to put all of those duties on a single person. Typically people’s skills and especially interests lie at one side or the other. So you generally do well to focus different members of the product team on the areas where their strengths and interests lie. Learn much more about how to staff and structure those roles in our white paper, Resourcing Your Salesforce CRM Product Team.

The Platforms Chief: "Protector of the Realm" and "Greatmaker"

The platforms team needs a chief. A great chief. A steward and protector, a guide and a field general. Every role on the team is important, but getting the right person steering the ship will differentiate whether the platforms team becomes an organizational gamechanger or just spends its time fixing things.

We’ve helped set this role up under several different names, and we’re not too picky about the title. That said, we’re very selective about the person. You need someone terrific steering the ship — someone who truly ‘gets it’.

There are two sides to the chief role. We call those sides the “Protector of the Realm” and the “Greatmaker”. Most of the time they are part of the same person’s role, but at a certain scale those two roles can also be held by a chief and a deputy.

Protector of the Realm

The bottom line for the “Protector of the Realm” side of the chief role is ensuring there is a healthy, two-way communication line between the organization’s priorities and the platform team’s capacity to execute. It is critical that the chief sits at the organization's leadership level in order to play this role. 

Before the chief was part of the leadership team, the organization would set strategy and make critical planning decisions without a clear understanding of its own capacity to execute given its technology landscape. The leadership team probably already had representation from Programs, Development, Marketing/Communications, and Operations. But as far as technology was concerned, directives would come rolling down the hill fully formed and without warning, often scrambling best laid plans, pulling the rug out from under longer term investments in motion, and sometimes dictating near term project timelines that were impossible to meet with any level of quality.

With the chief on the leadership team, it’s a different story. While organizational leadership is setting strategy and plans, it has the benefit of someone there who understands exactly what the organization is capable of from a technology standpoint, and on what timeline. The product chief can also keep an ear to the ground across the organization to close important communication loops, prevent problems before they take root, and align cross-organizational strategy with cross-organizational execution. 

Meanwhile, with the platforms chief in place at the leadership level, the platform team itself can do more effective and targeted work with the benefit of absolute clarity on the organization’s priorities and plans. They have the perspective needed to prioritize the most effective mix of longer term investments to strengthen the organization's technology foundation, together with more immediate or urgent projects.

Finally, leadership now includes the voice it needs to make clear the costs of neglecting key elements of its technology infrastructure, which otherwise only tends to happen once the levee breaks. The price of this awareness ends up being a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of cleaning up the mess later.

The Greatmaker

The other side of the chief role involves acting as “The Greatmaker” for the platform team’s work, meaning they are the person responsible for raising the level of the team’s game from merely good to outstanding. When it comes to the organization’s technology platforms, there will never be an end to the list of possible fixes, interventions, and ideas. So the entire ballgame comes down to a magical mix of the right set of prioritizations, the right people on the job, and the right mid-game adjustments.

It can be hard to pin down exactly where and when a skilled Greatmaker is raising the level of their team, but it’s always happening. You’ll see this person elevating good ideas from the team, helping act as a sounding board and thought partner for product managers, asking for the simplified, not-overly-technical reasoning behind a expert recommendation, helping tweak draft priority lists to more squarely hit their targets, and following instincts on when extra communication across departments is needed, to name just a few examples. 

Perhaps most importantly, the Greatmaker is a skilled and collaborative leader of people, who recognizes and appreciates their talents and interests, and who helps draw great work from them by creating an atmosphere of trust, humility, and expert helpfulness. They align excitement with opportunity, finding just the right people to geek out on just what the organization needs figured out, just at the right time. There’s a willingness to get into the details, to slow down when appropriate, not rush to a decision when complications are relevant, to hear everyone out, and to make lean, targeted bets to help learn what’s needed to sharpen the plan. 

Finally, the Greatmaker also isn’t simply satisfied with a slick build. This person knows that much more important for realizing the potential of the investment is the extent to which people (staff or external constituents) truly know how to take advantage of the platform. This requires an all-out ethos of communication and support that goes well beyond setting up a few trainings, but actually gets the product team on the playing field every day, working closely with their colleagues to deliver on the organization's mission.

Above all, the Greatmaker has excellent judgment. How? It’s hard to say, exactly. Greatmaking is a magical mix of skills that can’t easily be taught. But once you know what you're looking for you can recognize and nurture someone with the right raw materials. 

So what’s the profile?

As with many of the hires we recommend, the profile for this role may differ from what many organizations might expect. You’re not looking for a traditional CTO or CIO. Extreme technical depth is not the key skillset here. Sure, you benefit from someone with enough technical proficiency to dive to just enough depth to understand the tradeoffs of one path versus another. And yes, they need to be a systems thinker of the highest caliber.

But the key skillsets here are leadership, communication, and diplomacy, mixed with that special magic that allows someone to elevate a team to greatness. The right person may already be in your organization, in a different role, with their full potential waiting to be unleashed. Sometimes the right person can be elevated from one of the Product Manager roles — regardless of whether they have depth in each of the team's specific technologies — especially when they have already shown they excel at the types of skills and instincts required.

And when this person is hired externally, they need to be nothing short of fantastic. You as an organization need to be clear-eyed about who you are recruiting and what you are screening for, to be willing both to wait for the right person, and then to really set them up to succeed.

You don’t need the fancy tech genius, the IT whiz, or the ace developer. Those are all probably the wrong fit. You want the person who will both be right at home in your leadership team as "Protector of the Realm" of your technology, and who has the mix of "Greatmaker" qualities needed to raise your entire platform team of can-do problem-solvers and make-betterers — and with them your entire organization — to an entirely new level.

Put the Chief on Your Leadership Team

A fully-realized chief of the technology accelerator team (a.k.a. product team) is an executive team level position. Not having that voice on your leadership team is part of why your organization has been so consistently stumbling when it comes to its technology.

If it sounds outlandish to put the product chief role on your executive team level, that may be an indication that you’re still viewing your technology as an I.T.-level operations or service function, rather than a highly consequential, ever changing strategic challenge that will continually set direction for the entire organization.

Before you had this role on the leadership team, your organization was making strategic decisions, forming plans, and assigning priorities, probably with near total disconnect from its ability to execute on them from a technology standpoint. You likely had representation from most other key stakeholders. Program could weigh in about the complexities of its upcoming calendar. Fundraising could speak about how to leverage the opportunities ahead. Communications resolve questions around relative priorities as decisions were weighed.

But when it came to technology, it felt like sort of a black box. 

Now, once your chief is on the leadership team, you’re connecting your organization’s strategy and decision-making with its ability to execute in the real world. Now you’re setting strategy, goals, and timelines with a realistic sense of capacity and capability in the mix. Now you’re securing resources and staff at a realistic level to help technology initiatives deliver on their game-changing level of promise, instead of feeling hostage to a series of poorly-understood proposals and price tags that have been passed up the chain. Now you’re putting a strong organizational voice behind the bet that being able to harness the power and promise of technology is an essential ingredient for your organization to realize its potential.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you should just grab your IT person or a regular junior leaguer and stick them on the executive team. You should care about this hire just as much as a COO, a Development Director, or a Communications Director. You want someone with the ability to hold down a role with extreme competence and clear authority. You want a protector of the realm and a greatmaker. 

But once you have one, the benefits of having that role in the leadership team will become quickly apparent. Put a skilled leader in charge of your product team, include that role in your leadership team, and give your organization a shot to become great at using technology to extend its impact.

Flood the Zone with User Support

Many product managers probably spend a majority of their time and energy focused on what to build next, and relatively less energy on supporting people to use what is already built.

But is there any better investment than making sure what you’ve built is being used to its fullest potential? 

That’s because the people who use your platforms and products are the most important piece of the puzzle. It doesn’t matter how great a system is if it’s not used to its potential to accomplish its tactical goal. Cranking out a bunch of innovation that doesn’t get fully used doesn’t do your organization much good.

You need your systems to be well understood and well used. And to get there you need to “flood the zone” with training and support. 

Sure, iterating and developing the tool itself is a central part of the job for your technology accelerator team. But equally if not more important is an all-out, ally-minded dedication to ensuring that people have as much support as they need to use the existing capabilities. Such much so that when we’re building a team, we often fill an explicitly support-oriented role even before filling a more technical role.

When done well, this kind of support often looks much more casual than formal. It’s part of the relationship building you do all the time. 

People don’t just attend a couple trainings and then remember everything they need to know from there forward. That’s not how it really works, right? People need constant support, clarification, and reminders — in context -— as they’re trying to accomplish the work itself.

And by providing that level of support,  you’ll be getting as much help with your job as they will be getting help with theirs. Because to improve your systems you need constant feedback about what people’s challenges are,  what’s working well, and what could be improved. 

You’ve designed a racecar, and customized it for the race, and the expert drivers take it around the track and tell you how it feels. You make further adjustments, they take it out again, and on and on. You’re also watching them circle the track and noting things from your perspective, things they might not notice themselves about their own usage, you may see some slipping around the corner and know just how to tighten that up. You are not an inexperienced order taker here, you’re an expert engineer with experience and ideas about how to make things better. But you need to be there, watching them work, in order to bring this experience to bear. The cycle never stops, though the improvements get more and more precise, eventually addressing every aspect of the race. 

You can’t race the car for them. They need you to be thinking about new ways to make the engine more efficient and powerful, or new ways to make the shape a bit more optimally aerodynamic. But you can’t do this hiding behind a ticket queue, you have to get out there and be a part of the race, ready to jump in and help however is needed.

So don’t begrudgingly offer support around the edges. And don’t wait until people seek you out, or you’ll miss 80% of the useful stuff and 80% of the chance to make an impact. Flood the zone with user support! Every repetition you get out there on the field will make your users more confident, more secure, and give you constant reminders about what the actual priorities are.

Get Out From Behind Your Ticketing Queue

Photo by Mimi Thian

A couple years ago I tore up my knee playing softball. It wasn’t super glorious, although I’m still grateful that we live in a day and age where they could take a ruined knee and make it work again. That still seems like an utter miracle.

That said, the long road back from injury included a staggering number of physical therapy appointments over the course of two years — at times as many as three times a week. 

To schedule each appointment, after I was done with the previous session I would walk out past the reception area and schedule the next one. It didn’t take long to realize that there was a serious issue with the scheduling software. 

Stephanie — who was relentlessly nice about it — would have to re-start from the beginning for each different physical therapist whose schedule she wanted to check. She would find a possible time for me with one therapist, then start over, try a different therapist, and find a comparison time. It took a shocking amount of typing and clicking to be able to say “Kathleen has a 3:15 on Wednesday. Now let me start over and check Randy’s schedule…” 

Often she would check the schedule like this for 4-5 different therapists in order to schedule one appointment. And that process happened 3 times a week just for me, but probably many thousands of times a week for all of the patients coming by her desk. What an atrocious use of Stephanie’s time and energy.

How Stephanie didn’t hurl her computer out the window is truly a mystery to me.

When you witness a situation like this, it’s pretty clear that no one on the software development team has spent much time hanging out at Stephanie’s desk, just watching her use the system they built. If they did, they would have 15 different ideas of things to improve within the first hour. And one of those ideas just might save the hospital system about 100,000 staff hours over the next year.

But chances are, someone in the IT or software team has come by at various times to fix an issue Stephanie submitted as a help ticket. Maybe they even fixed it, solved her problem, and left her happy. 

That’s great. But it’s not the same.

If you really want to improve your technology tools and systems, you have to get out from behind your ticketing queue. Ask people if you can watch them use that new feature at some point. Offer to help show them that thing again from the training at a time when they will actually need to use it. Check back in about how that event went, if they were able to enter the new contacts in, and whether they had any problems or ideas on how to improve it for next time.

If you really want your system to fulfill its potential as a gamechanger, get off your rear and get in the game.

The Improver Personality

It used to be that some lucky companies would just happen to hire someone who happened to have the gumption to say, “This could be better, folks.” And who would be able to tweak their systems accordingly, or find someone who could. And then to go around and show everyone how to take advantage of the new tweaks.

Usually that person would have a whole other job that would make up 100% of their performance review, and these extracurricular improvements would hardly be commented upon. The company might still ask if they could fix this or that when they got a chance, or fit in a staff training into their schedule. But they would be expected to do that “off the side of their desks.” 

But can you imagine a better investment than someone who is wired to constantly improve the way everything in your organization works?

Sounds great, of course. Who wouldn’t want that person on board.

In fact, we've found these "Improvers" in every organization we've worked with, sometimes put to good use and sometimes not. Sometimes they are even the target of annoyance for people who are more comfortable plugging forward with business as usual.

But don’t overlook the treasure these people represent. Some people are wired to find solutions. You should be on the lookout for people with this “Improver” personality. 

Of course it can be tricky. You need problem solvers who are careful, measured, who listen well and work well with others. Don’t be too quick to toss the keys of your rocketship to some big ego with a lot of confidence. A lack of humility is a big red flag. 

But often, the most effective problem solvers, the careful, thoughtful, humble ones, the good listeners, are already operating within your organization. They look for opportunities for improvement. They help their teammates do their work better.

You should recognize this quickly. These people are force multipliers. Build a smart team of these kinds of people, invest in them and their ability to improve the engines of your organization’s work. You’ll wonder how you ever got by without them. 
 

You're Hiring for the Wrong Thing

A common mistake organizations make is hiring developers. This is technology, right? That must mean we need developers.

Not really, no.

Developers are very important in technology, but they often represent the most outsourceable skillset. And in fact there are a number of ways that you’re better served by outsourcing development than trying to hire for it. Development requires a significant level of depth on the platform, extensive experience, and ever-evolving knowledge of best practices and lurking gotchas. 

If you’re trying to hire for this set of skills, let alone support, manage, or monitor its level of quality, you’re probably getting yourself in over your head. Now it’s on you to make sure this developer has the time, resources, and motivation to stay on top of the ever changing realms of their particular skillsets. Meanwhile you will likely become beholden to the platforms and preferences of your chosen internal developers, regardless of their objective merit as technology evolves. This approach can lead to some short term victories, but it very commonly leads to long term pain and instability.

In fact advanced technical development is the skillset that external firms are BEST equipped to provide. It’s what they do all day, every day. Engage the right external experts, and give them the right level of partnership, and you’ll be in a much better position.

So what skillsets should you be hiring? 

First and foremost you need Product Managers, who are the strategic synthesizers, informed diplomatic communicators, and skilled shepherds of your high quality technology efforts. You may be able to outsource some pieces of the puzzle, but you can’t outsource the brains of your technology operation, and your product managers are the improver personalities who are ultimately responsible for the sustained greatness of your platforms. When you’re hiring, start here.

And when it comes time to expand your efforts, you would be well served to focus on flooding the zone with training and support. There is rarely a more highly leveraged technology investment than having someone on staff who is an intuitive trainer, has a knack for proactive and gracious user support, and excels at person-to-person communication.  

Is this in line with your organization’s assumptions when it comes to staffing your technology platforms? If not, you’re probably hiring for the wrong thing.

Finding Great External Partners and Making Technology Magic

To reach a new level of orbit with your organization’s technology, you need a crack internal Technology Accelerator Team (a.k.a. Digital Product Team), but you ALSO need terrific external partners.

This combination of a terrific internal product team owning the strategy and internal communications, buy-in, training, and support — together with terrific external partners who bring expertise on the vast options out there and needed skills — is how you truly make magic with your technology. In the end, internal and external will be less important. You will become one big team, and just like you need to find the right people for the people for your internal team, you need to find the right people to be your external collaborators.  

So, when deciding who you will work with, remember the specific team of people you’re going to work with is what matters most. The firm or agency certainly matters, because great firms often have strong processes to attract and retain great people. But keep in mind that many firms have terrific principals or skilled salespeople, and that they’re not the people showing up day after day to deliver on your work. We’ve all experienced the difference between having someone good on your project, and having someone great on it. It took us a long time to realize we needed to meet the specific people doing the day-to-day work BEFORE we agreed to work together with the firm.

Don’t rely on RFPs

Finding the right partner to make magic with requires time and care. Crafting an RFP might be helpful to force you to talk to all your stakeholders and pull together an idea for what you think you want. However, there are well known pitfalls to the RFP process, which include:

1. By over-imagining an end state you may be locking the path on a lesser north star. The value of working with experts is precisely that they will bring ideas you will not have thought of, and it’s often much better to try to identify, together, a minimum viable starting point, and allocate plenty of budget to take it from there based on what you learn as you go. 

2. If you tie yourself to scope,  you are playing the wrong game. If you’re thinking, “I need this, just this, and that’s it,” you are likely misunderstanding the nature of technology today. You may think you’re aiming for some ideal or even barely acceptable end-state, but there is no end state. You must begin a path of perpetual improvement and find great partners for the journey. 

3.  If you’re quickly scanning to the pricing page when it’s time to pretend you’re doing a real comparison, the whole preparation was likely a waste of your time and theirs. And we’ve seen and heard from more people than we can count that the option initially chosen for cost reasons regularly vastly under-delivered on the overall goal of the project. In those cases organizations end up spending much more just to get to something minimally acceptable in the end. Ask around and you’ll hear plenty of examples of this. 

So if not RFPs, then how do you find a great partner? Well, word of mouth is one effective tool. Ask around until you find someone who LOVES their partner, and then have a conversation with them to understand the details. What works? Who specifically do they work with? What techniques have they learned to get the best out of the relationship?

What else?

In addition, we’ve identified a number of factors that we have found are key to healthy, productive client-partner collaborations, which we’ll lay out below. You can also watch this talk from a Salesforce partners conference that covers these points in the context of work in Salesforce.

A truly agile process

Your work together must use a *truly* agile process. Most firms nowadays either incorporate some element of an agile process in their work, or can at least talk a decent game about it. But here’s one test: does the agency require a change order when you add a requirement or change your mind about something? If so, that’s not working in an agile way. Scope creep is a foolish term that aims to protect the wrong target. Scope will evolve as you build and you test and you use. And it should. This is the nature of the work. 

It’s true that ever-changing scope is an awkward fit for most budget processes and project timelines. Executives and management need certainty in order to plan! You were supposed to somehow guess last year during budget planning how much this project was going to cost, without even quite knowing what you would end up building. We realize this is awkward and there aren’t great answers to this, perhaps besides unabashedly embracing the uncertainty and padding budgets. 

And yet this is the absolute truth of how great work happens. You simply can’t know what you need to know to make choices until you’re in the midst of the work. And you NEED the flexibility to make strategic choices between options as they emerge -- EVEN if they might increase project cost. Don’t rob yourself of a potentially game-changing adjustment that presents itself, simply because you didn’t predict it would be there. That’s betting against your own success! If increasing budget simply isn’t an option, then effective prioritization serves as your protection -- take the new win and de-prioritize something else. This is the very essence of working in an agile manner. Both the organization and the partner must build their process and expectations around this reality, or once again fumble their attempts at game-changing technology interventions by kneecapping them before they’ve seen the light of day.  

The virtuous braintrust

When it comes to working together, you’re looking to create what we call a “virtuous braintrust” of skilled, thoughtful people working together at the table. The organization and the partner should be on the same team, working together towards interventions that change the game for the cause they are pursuing. That means that everyone relevant should be at the table when appropriate. Partners shouldn’t hide their skilled experts and clients shouldn’t hide their executives behind product managers on both sides, making everyone play games of telephone where critical nuances are lost in translation. Sure, there may be many meetings when not everyone needs to be present. But there should be no reluctance to get people on a call together when needed, so the work product can be maximized. 

Thoughtfulness and healthy discussion

Once everyone is at the table, you also want a partner that embraces thoughtfulness and healthy discussion. What you don’t want is a partner (or specific partner staff) with a shred of defensiveness, or the mistaken impression they need to appear to be a complete expert on every single thing that is thrown their way, or who sees suggestions for improvement as some sort of challenge to their expertise. If everyone is on the same team, everyone on all sides should be happy to have questions posed, ideas raised, roads explored, until everyone is satisfied that the group has landed on the best course of action.

Seeking out feedback

Extra bonus points go to partners who actively seek feedback and constantly want to improve their own offering. It’s an important sign of humility in approach, of health in their processes, and in how much they care about achieving greatness together with you rather than just clocking in so they can cash your next check.

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If you look at the list of factors above and feel a little overwhelmed, that’s certainly understandable. It’s easy to see why, by comparison, it’s tempting to just write up an RFP, cast it out on a listserve, and wait for the order-takers to deliver their proposals. But is it any wonder that practice so often fails to deliver real value?

Remember, digital products are ever-evolving. And as such, a partner relationship should be an ongoing relationship too, beyond the initial project. You are guaranteed to need more out of that relationship than you are envisioning at the outset. This relationship is a big deal, and it’s worth putting in the thoughtfulness and the work required to get it right.

What You're Getting for an Hourly Rate

We advocate for outsourcing software development and in-sourcing the key strategic skillset of product management along with an in-house emphasis on training and support.

But sometimes we’ll get pushback based on the cost of retaining external developers, especially when the organization is getting significant developer invoices on a regular basis. 

But there are a couple reasons that outsourcing software development makes good sense. 

The first is that the financial argument for hiring internal developers is probably misleading to begin with. Salaries and associated costs like benefits and facilities are often the most significant organizational expenses by a long shot. It’s just that as a department leader you might not come face to face with those personnel costs on a monthly basis. Whereas every time you receive that external developer invoice it can feel like a significant hit from your department’s “elective” budget. 

Sure, paying that invoice might feel expensive. But what are the realistic alternatives to get the work done that your organization needs delivered?

Some organizations might consider hiring a less experienced developer for less than the total cost of outsourcing work to an experienced one. But if you think your needs aren’t that complicated and any junior leaguer should be able to do a sufficient job without consequence, you may be underestimating the difficulty of the work — or the costs and implications of messing it up.

And even if you could hire an experienced developer, that may sound like a better idea than it usually turns out to be. Is your organization qualified to judge your developer’s choice of platforms or languages? To do code review in order to ensure long term quality and viability? To know how to manage or develop that person’s skills as a member of your staff? Or are you just planning to hire someone who seems qualified and hope everything somehow works out?

By contrast, when you retain an external developer or firm, the expectation should be that the work quality is high to begin with, that there is qualified oversight of that work in place, and that the knowledge and skills of their personnel are keeping up with the cutting edge in their complex realms. A good external developer is keeping on top of the very latest developments in their technology, always honing their skills, and in the case of a firm, is providing both technical and project management oversight to deliver what your organization needs at a high level of quality, reliability, and robustness. In the right external developer relationship you should be getting high quality, well-honed, ever-improving expertise along with ongoing quality control and quality assurance.

That’s not to say that every external developer is going to deliver at the level of quality you need. Finding and maintaining the right external partner relationships is an entire art unto itself (a post detailing this is coming). But finding one is a necessary part of the equation, and unlocks a far better path towards the quality of technology you need compared to attempting to build that capability in house.

So yes, that external firm’s hourly rates might appear high. But if you’re losing heart every time you receive an invoice from a skilled external expert who is helping you deliver at a level of excellence on your organization’s specific needs and dreams, you may be missing the point entirely. Expertise takes time, direction, and focus to achieve. This is the game you’re in. Can you afford to play it clumsily?

Nobody Cares About Your Website Launch

Don’t send out an announcement about your new website. Nobody cares about your website launch.

You’ve worked hard on it, you’ve probably spent a good amount of time and money on it. It was a huge project and you want to recognize your staff’s efforts! But that’s not a good enough reason. Don’t send a press release about how much time you spend making your hair look great. Unless your business is making hair look great.

Photo by Nathan Bingle

Why? Because chances are your new website is about you, it’s not about them.

“Come read pages of text about our different programs” might sound interesting to you. “Come peruse our annual report” might seem like your idea of a good time. “Come click through every staff member’s bio and read about their quirky choice of favorite food” might be how you’d spend your next half hour.

But it’s probably a yawner to most people, even those who love your organization.

Don’t get me wrong, a great new website will be more engaging, and the proof will be in the pudding! Definitely improve your website! Check the analytics. Is it performing better? Are people navigating around more intuitively? Are they staying on the site for longer? Are they seeing more content you want them to see? That’s great!

But just the fact that you have a new website? That probably won’t get anyone’s pulse racing.

UNLESS!

Unless you are letting your constituents know: Now you can...

If you’ve added a new capability that people will be interested in or excited about using, then that’s real news. Use the “Now you can” test.

As in: “Now you can watch first-person videos from people we serve and sponsor them directly.” How cool!

Or: “Now you can manage your own recurring donation on our website.” Great, that used to be a pain.

Or: “Now you can sign up for and manage your own volunteer shifts, and see your entire volunteer history and award levels.” Let’s check it out.

If you don’t have a really solid “Now you can” that will bring value to the people receiving the email, then just don’t send your launch announcement. Instead, let people discover your beautiful new website next time they go to check you out. They’ll think this is just how you operate. (Or if you must, mention it in a p.s. on another email that actually is bringing them real value.) Be a pro, and act like you’ve been in the end zone before.

And most importantly, for the love of Pete, treat your new website as the starting line, not the finish line. Turn it from a one time event to a new level of commitment to constantly improve everything about how you reach people, interact with them, and deliver ever-increasing value to them as they help you have greater impact in the world.

Detangling Digital

If you ask five or ten different digital directors what their scope/remit is, the answers will be all over the map. You see completely different meanings of a Digital department from organization to organization. In some cases it refers to digital campaigning and organizing. In others it means writing and sending email. Some digital departments are made up of social media specialists. Still others feature traditional IT functions, and/or ownership of digital platforms like the CRM or website CMS.

If there is a clear singular function to the Digital department, then we’ve got no quarrel with it. If your Digital department is clearly focused on digital campaigning, for instance, you can call it whatever you like. 

The problems creep in when a Digital department becomes an excuse to mash together multiple disparate functions into a single home that strains to support them. In the most extreme cases, the Digital department may even be asked to include all of the above functions at once, with the reasoning that they all involve digital technology in some way. 

We liken that to the idea of having a “Department of Paper”, and insisting that all work involving paper must go through that single department. That concept is obviously absurd, but not too much more absurd than saying that all things digital nowadays go through a single digital team. How could that possibly work? How could anyone coherently manage communications, fundraising, social media, traditional IT, and tech platform development all together? How could you effectively prioritize, or manage such a complex combination of workflows? 

For some this may sound sacrilegious, since over the last decade or so the creation of a separate “digital” department often represented a hard-fought victory, wresting the control and management of all things digital away from staff who were masters of legacy systems and media but who were unfamiliar with how to harness the power of newer digital tools effectively.

But in today’s rapidly evolving world, we should admit that the big-D “Digital” umbrella has outlived its usefulness. 

Smushing together digital has real, problematic consequences. It distracts people from their core work, undermines priorities, misaligns incentives, and causes core functions to slip through the cracks. You’re left with a team that is usually overwhelmed, constantly being asked to do things outside their areas of expertise, and frustratedly rowing in different directions -- from each other and from others in the organization.
 

These days damn near everything is digital in some way, so we need more useful distinctions. When it comes time to untangle the undifferentiated digital mess, here’s a simple guiding principle: everyone should get to focus on their areas of expertise. Campaigners should spend their time campaigning. Communicators should spend their time communicating. Fundraisers should spend their time fundraising. IT staff should spend their time doing IT. Digital product managers should be evolving their digital products (such as CRM and CMS platforms). 

Each of these areas is a complex area of expertise that requires focus and care, and should be supported in a department that supports and enhances its mission. And each should be able use the tools of their trade, which these days, include digital tools and mediums.

If you’re a campaigner who needs to send an email, you should be able to work through and negotiate your content and sending schedule with your campaigning and communications colleagues. Then between those teams, someone should be able to pull up a template on the email system, populate your content, and schedule the message. And this should be able to happen without having to compete for priority and attention with people who are developing your CRM system, or A/B testing website donation page copy, or fixing your office printers. The workflows and skillsets for each are entirely distinct.

So at this point, we most commonly find ourselves recommending the integration of digital skillsets back into every department according to the area of expertise.
 

For some organizations, this might only require a slight tweak -- a few meaningful adjustments to job descriptions. For others, it could take a radical re-organization, and those should never be undertaken lightly. But the appropriate structure for today’s organization should reflect the reality that a basic level of digital fluency can no longer ever be “someone else’s” responsibility, it must be everyone’s. 

And of course we’re not talking about every staff-member learning highly technical configuration and development skills! Those should remain specialized. We’re just saying every department needs to include people who know how to use the digital tools that are part of their trade. 

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So once you get each of these other functions back to their home planets, is there still a need for any kind of digital specialization? Yes! Very much so! In fact, sorting those functions back out leaves a clearer focus on the key gap that remains, which is the critical work of managing your core digital platforms (such as your CRM and CMS). Give these responsibilities to people who are focused, talented, and aspiring to become masters of that work. That’s the heart of a digital product team.

So if you’re in charge of a Digital team and are finding yourself in the business of herding cats and balancing unreasonable expectations, take a moment to think about what is at the core of your remit, and perhaps more importantly the core of your interest and talent. What do you think success looks like? Whatever it is, could that become the clear focus of your team? And could the other functions of digital be moved to the spot in the organization where they can really thrive?

Everyone likes to geek out on something. Wouldn’t it be great, both in terms of staff happiness and organizational effectiveness, if people spent their time focused on the areas where they bring the most energy and talent to the table?